1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a system and method for mapping user interfaces. In particular, the present invention relates to a system and method for using the tab order of elements to determine the order in which elements are displayed on a constrained device.
2. Description of the Related Art
A common problem in the computer industry is running applications on devices having different form factors and different display sizes. A user may wish, for example, to run Microsoft Word both on this personal computer system at home and on his personal data assistant (PDA) while on the road. The same application user interface, however, will not work on both displays. The Pocket PC display cannot display the same amount of information that an application like Word typically displays on the larger screen of a personal computer. An application's user interface would have to be significantly adapted in order to execute the application on a PDA. Mobile phone displays are more constrained than PDA displays. An application's user interface would need to be modified yet again for an application to execute on a mobile phone.
Often, an application designer is required to design a different user interface for each one of the different display types an application is to execute on. In having to do so, much of the application designer's effort is duplicated. Most of the visual layout of the application's user interface has to be redesigned by specifying a different position for each of the different elements/controls used in the interface.
Currently, most applications use separate style sheets to achieve renderings of the user interface on different types of devices. While this alleviates some of the duplicate effort, it requires the application developer to develop multiple style sheets to achieve appropriate rendering of the user interface across a variety of devices. These devices are not generally platform or container independent.
What is needed therefore is a system and a method that would enable the application designer to more easily design an application that can be used on multiple platforms without much duplicated effort for each additional display/device. In addition, the application designer should be able to specify rules on how the user interface for an application would be rendered (depending on the width, height, and other display capabilities, for example) on devices having different display types.
In particular, what is needed is a system and method that renders elements on a constrained display in an order determined by the tab order of the various displayed elements.